Education: September 2007 Archives

Seems folks are starting to wake up to the real threat to school choice posed by the current consolidation effort:

Raymond's abuzz with school choice, consolidation
By Elizabeth Raffaele

“It’s been a hot topic of conservation for several months now,� said Wendy Trask, Raymond school board member.

“We have heard many parents become vocal in telling the school board members or sending us e-mails directly that they are for choice no matter what school they merge with,� Trask said.

Historically, because the town of Raymond does not have a high school, parents have the ability to send their children to various schools including Windham High School, Gray/New Gloucester High School, and Poland High School.

Parents also have the ability to send their children to a private school, if the parent pays any additional costs above the town's yearly cost in tuition, which is roughly $8,300, according to the Maine Department of Education.

According to department spokesman David Connerty-Marin, parents in Raymond will continue to be able to send their kids to the various public or private schools, even if they join with another school district(s).

If a parent chooses a private or public school that costs more than the allotted $8,300, parents pay the difference, Connerty-Marin said.

If Raymond consolidates with district(s) that have lower yearly tuition costs, the town of Raymond would pay the difference for parents to send their kids to another public or private school, up to the $8,300.

In other words, he said, "Raymond pays for Raymond kids to have school choice" under consolidation.

School choice was one of the factors in Deb Cutten’s decision to move to the town in 1995.

“That sounded appealing to us at the time,� Cutten said.

“That’s my primary concern is that we will not have choice as we do now,� Cutten said.

Read the rest here.

An AP wire story out yesterday revealed that "The Utah Education Association received small donations from teacher unions in Wyoming, Colorado, Ohio and Maine" in support of its efforts to defeat a school voucher plan passed by the Utah legislature. The plan goes before voters in November. According to the article, voucher opponents, led by the teacher's unions, have raised more than $1.8 million, a million dollars more than voucher supporters have raised for their side.

Counted among that $1.8 million is this $1000 contribution from the Maine Education Association.

Why would the MEA spend $1000 to fight school vouchers in Utah? The same reason they have fought reforms like charter schools here in Maine for years - to protect their power and influence.

How sad it is that instead of working to improve Maine's schools, the MEA is focused instead on crushing a promising and innovative school reform effort thousands of miles away, and using the dues paid by hard-working Maine teachers to do it. Our teachers deserve better.

The following piece from Seacoast Online is more revealing than it seems.

The new school district consolidation law contains a provision that exempts a school district from having to consolidate if, despite its best efforts, no neighboring district wants to merge with it. In its review of the consolidation plans submitted at the end of last month, though, the Department of Education found most of these so-called “doughnut-hole� districts to be “out of compliance.� The letters most of them received indicated that the Department planned to work further with them to find consolidation partners.

The issue for most, though, was that a merger would have cost either them or their prospective partners more money than they spend now.

The state’s proposed solution? The plan, as the following article indicates, is that the state intends to enact specific legislation for each new district, including customized cost-sharing agreements. In other words, if, under existing school funding law, a merger of school districts results in some kind of cost shift, the state intends to create, though separate legislation, a district-specific funding formula to hold merging districts harmless.

The result? Page after page of new state law, a dizzying array of school funding formulas that vary from town to town, and the need to enact state legislation, through the legislative process, in Augusta, to change the way your school district is funded and governed.

Another nail in the coffin of local control…

Kittery schools won't be left out of merger dealing, state says

AUGUSTA, Maine — The state commissioner of education this week deemed Kittery schools out of compliance with the state consolidation law, and at the same time said the abutting school districts need to go back to the drawing board and reconsider merging with their neighbor.
But in order to sweeten what could be a potentially bitter financial pill for either the York school district or School Administrative District 35, Commissioner Susan Gendron has also pledged to go to the Legislature if need be to rectify the monetary impact.

Read the rest here.

Resistance is growing!

SEARSPORT — SAD 56 school board members discussed joining an effort opposing the state’s school district consolidation law Tuesday, but decided to take no action until more research is done.

The issue was raised by board member Jim Cunningham, who said he had seen several articles in the Bangor Daily News recently detailing efforts by people in Washington County and in Stonington to fight the school district consolidation legislation.

Superintendent Mary Szwec shared one of those articles with board and audience members, which detailed the effort of Stonington resident Lawrence “Skip� Greenlaw, Jr. to repeal the law. According to the article, Greenlaw’s plan is to mount a petition drive asking legislators to repeal the law.

Greenlaw told the Bangor newspaper he plans to hold a press conference Friday, Sept. 15 in Bangor to kick off the petition campaign. The article said the petition would need 55,087 signatures to be sent to legislators, but Greenlaw said he hopes to get 100,000 signatures.

“It’s not that difficult to get 55,000 signatures,� said board member Veronica Magnan. “It really isn’t. I think it’s something we might look into.�

Magnan said if members of school boards across the state helped get signatures, it would not be that difficult to accomplish.

Board Chairman Bob Danks said despite the interest voiced by some people, he felt SAD 56 needed to move ahead with its plan to merge with SAD 34 in order to comply with the state law. Danks said SAD 56 should plan as if the consolidation mandate will remain law, rather than hope that it might be overturned and then not have that happen.

Danks said he would entertain a motion to form a subcommittee to look into joining the anti-consolidation effort, however, and have that group report back to the full board at its next meeting. Cunningham made the motion to do so, and it was seconded by board member Harold Grove. The vote in favor of forming the subcommittee was unanimous.

Cunningham, Grove and Magnan volunteered to serve on the committee. Szwec said Cunningham would facilitate the group.

An outstanding report was done by Don Carrigan of WCSH this past week on the likely impact that consolidation efforts will have on the town academies. Text below is from their website, but the video story, which can be seen by clicking the "Play Video" link on this page has much more.

Will "Town Academies" Survive School Consolidation?
Web Editor: Ken Christian, New Media Manager

CHINA (NEWS CENTER) -- As school boards around the state figure out how to consolidate their school districts, one group of towns wants to make sure some things don't change.
Thousands of high school students and their families get to choose what school they attend, and have the town pay the tuition. Schools like Erskine Academy in China depend on school choice.

Erskine is a private school, but serves as the primary local high school for eight towns. Many of these so-called "town academies" have been in business for more than a century.

The new law lets towns continue school choice, but Erskine Headmaster Don Poulin says the town academies still worry there could be pressure to change the choice system in the future.

School officials in some of the towns that send students to Erskine say keeping school choice is one of their primary concerns in the district consolidation effort.

The Department of Education says the new law allows town to continue to offer choice, and only individual towns can vote to take school choice away.

By Rich Hewitt
Wednesday, September 05, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

STONINGTON, Maine - With backing from 28 communities and more expected to join, a grass-roots effort to overturn the state’s school consolidation law will get under way this weekend.

Lawrence "Skip" Greenlaw Jr. of Stonington said he plans to hold an organizational meeting for those who have expressed an interest in working on a petition drive that would ask Maine legislators to repeal the law. That meeting is set for 9 a.m. Saturday at the Ramada Inn on Odlin Road in Bangor.

Greenlaw, a member of the Deer Isle-Stonington CSD school committee and a former state legislator, jump-started the repeal effort last month when he sent letters first to school committee chairs around the state, then to municipal officials, seeking their support and advice. The response was not overwhelming, Greenlaw said, but there was enough interest to move forward with the effort.

"As of Saturday, September 1, I have received communications from 36 individuals representing 28 Maine towns," he said. "As the petition drive gets under way and attracts more public attention, I expect much more participation from a far wider area."

Greenlaw said he has had indications that some school committee chairs were waiting for formal approval from their school committees before signaling willingness to support and participate in a repeal effort.

The letters of support have come from small and large communities in all areas of the state. Greenlaw said he expects support to grow rapidly as people become more aware of the issues.

Read the rest here. Go to the meeting on Saturday!!

The Bangor Daily News was kind enough to publish an op-ed today on the school reform idea that is the subject of my new Maine View report "Saving our Small Schools: Is Privatization an Option."

Best way to keep local school may be to close it

by Stephen Bowen
Saturday, September 01, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

Aug. 31 marked the first deadline in the state-mandated process for consolidating Maine’s many school districts into larger, regional ones. Districts were to submit "letters of intent" to the Department of Education by that date identifying potential partners for district consolidation. While there were reports of resistance, predominantly in rural areas, the department reported widespread compliance with the new law, despite findings by many districts that consolidation would be a big and costly mistake.

Acquiescence by local districts in a process that ultimately results in their dissolution should come as no surprise. The new consolidation law contains brutal financial penalties for districts that fail to cooperate.

Local school boards, therefore, have few options before them. They can comply with the law, and give up local decision-making, oversight, and even ownership of their local schools, or they can go to voters and ask for a property tax hike to cover the loss of state funding that comes as a consequence of defying the law.

Or they could close their school, which, as unbelievable as it sounds, may be the best option available.

About a decade ago, the passage of a divisive school funding law in Vermont led one town there, Winhall, to undertake a novel act of civil disobedience. Fighting to hold on to its local school amid pressure to consolidate, the town replaced its public school with a community-created private one located in the same building. The town arranged to have its children tuitioned to the new private school under the state’s town tuitioning law, and students returned to school that fall hardly noticing that in their summer-long absence it had been converted from public to private.

What did Winhall gain from this? Independence. Like all private schools, the new Winhall school became free to run its own educational programs without the incessant state and federal meddling that so bedevils public schools. They also preserved local control, in the form of a community board of trustees, rather than join a much larger consolidated school district as Maine communities are being forced to do today.

Can it be done here? In a new report for Maine Heritage Policy Center, I suggest that it might just be possible.

Reads the rest here